A 12-year-old thinks the premise of “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” belies structural racism.

[conuly]

My 12-year-old daughter had a sticker on her water bottle with a quote from Dr. Seuss: “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” A classmate told her the sticker was racist because many people can’t choose what they want to do because of structural racism. My daughter peeled off the sticker and threw it away. When she told me about it, I was at a loss. I believe structural racism is real and pernicious, but I also think we should teach children that they have agency. And my daughter and I like the sticker’s message. Help!

Twelve-year-olds are not famous for nuance. (Their greater claim may be making classmates feel bad about their water bottles.) But you are an adult. Start a conversation with your daughter that goes beyond slogans and stickers to a more thoughtful consideration of race.

She has surely learned about slavery in her history classes. But tell her about some of the subtler discrimination that makes up structural racism: our long history of inequality in housing and educational opportunities for people of color, for instance, and the modern-day hangover of those unfair policies.

And for a firsthand account, read the sparkling memoir “Brown Girl Dreaming” with your daughter. Its author, Jacqueline Woodson, chronicles her childhood in South Carolina and New York, the institutional forces that held her family back, and the unstoppable optimism that pushed her forward. If there’s a problem living life as she and Dr. Seuss suggest, I can’t see it. Can you?

Comments

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[cereta]

Who's the columnist for this one?

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[conuly]

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/01/style/racism-talking-to-children.html

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[xenacryst]

Hmm. Yes, ish, but the answer is also not big on nuance. We can applaud the intent of the quote and also acknowledge that the reality is not universal (and further, read Brown Girl Dreaming and acknowledge that it's an awesome book). There are many facets to race, ambition, and structural racism. Someone might be able to steer themselves in any direction (subject to knowing those directions exist, having some encouragement that those directions are worthwhile for themselves), and still find roadblocks. Nothing is simple, not even my answer.

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[dragoness_e]

Telling children "you have no chance of pursuing your dreams because 'they' won't let you" is even more toxic and abusive than telling children "you can be anything you want, even president, if you just apply yourself". Ask every woman who was told as little girl that "girls can't be X" when she expressed a dream to do or be X if she would rather have been told "someday you can do X if you work hard at it"?

It might be hard, it might be impossible today, but times and situations change. There were no women astronauts when I was a girl, and the idea was an impossible dream. There are now. There were and are no women priests/pastors/reverends in the religion of my birth, the highest religious aspiration allowed to girls was the nunnery, but just across the street, there are women pastors in the Episcopal church today.

Also, tell the kid that sticker IS NOT RACIST, and that the other girl was a mean lying bitch.

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[laurajv]

Certainly times and situations change, but X is correct that the original answer lacks nuance. "Oh the Places You'll Go" may not be racist, but it does entirely sidestep structural issues that can affect the ability of individuals to succeed.

And calling a child who is concerned about structural racism "a mean lying bitch" is completely out of line and wildly misogynist.

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[ayebydan]

Agreed

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[dragoness_e]

If you think encouraging little girls is "racist", and therefore undesirable, I am definitely not the misogynist here.

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[lemonsharks]

But casting little girls of color as "lying bitches" for talking about their experience of racism in their worlds and in the fiction they've read is ... Just fine and dandy for you? So long as the little white girls who are hurting them out of ignorance are saved from "feeling bad"?

That's certainly a take.

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[dragoness_e]

Why do you assume the bully here was black, and not the bullied girl? We're not given any information on race here; they could both be white with the other girl playing the 'more Woke than thou' game. Teenagers certainly do that enough on the internet.

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[lemonsharks]

I'm no longer talking about the children in the letter. I'm talking about you.

You said the following to minoanmiss, who is black, speaking of her own experience:


I don't know, would you pick on a classmate and try to make her feel bad about the decorations on her water bottle? That kind of behavior screams "mean girl" to me. Especially when it's about a very cool and uplifting quote, and if you think encouraging little girls is "racist", and therefore undesirable, I will not think charitably of you.


So I ask YOU:

Is it appropriate to cast little girls of color as mean lying bitches for talking about their experience of racism in the world, and in the fiction they encounter? Or should they shut up about it and grit their teeth through microaggression out of microaggression, to spare the feelings of the little white girls who hurt them through their ignorance?

Because that is what you have been heavily implying throughout the entire conversation.

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[lemonsharks]

and here's a hint for you:

It is NEVER appropriate, under ANY circumstances, for a grownass adult such as yourself to call ANY child a "mean lying bitch".

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[xenacryst]

I'm not sure if you misread me, but I'm not saying that we should tell kids they can't pursue dreams because "they" won't let you. I'm saying that we should acknowledge the structural racism that makes pursuing some dreams harder than others for some people more than others. And then go ahead and cheer kids on and support them as they pursue the dreams that they desire.

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[cereta]

Or the parent could maybe not call a twelve-year-old a bitch. I've had some pretty strong opinions on some of my twelve-year-old's classmates, but encouraging my daughter to use language that disparages women would not be a particularly awesome response.

Also, as much as I get frustrated by people's and publications' reluctance to use the word "lie" when someone is obviously telling a deliberate untruth, "lying" implies intent to deceive. Unless the LW, or you, have some reason to think that what the classmate said was not her sincerely held belief, calling her a liar is both excessive and untrue. Twelve-year-olds may not be known for nuance, but they are old enough to understand that people can genuinely believe something that the child does not.

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[minoanmiss]

When I was twelve I might have said "that sticker is racist" out of both cluelessness and clue: I don't think twelve year old me would have realized that telling my friend that would make her feel bad, and also see above with twelve year olds lacking nuance. But I also can't tell you the first racist thing anyone ever said to me in my life because as far back as my memory goes people were pelting me with microaggressions. I remember being three and having a White woman take a book from me because she didn't believe I could read. I remember being seven and having my classmates tell me there was no way a Black girl could grow up to be a doctor. I remember being twelve and getting propositioned by random men and followed around in stores by staff lest I steal something. So when I was twelve, I might well have reached that conclusion, especially on one of the bad days.

Are you prepared to call me a mean, lying bitch?

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[ayebydan]

*hearts;

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[dragoness_e]

I don't know, would you pick on a classmate and try to make her feel bad about the decorations on her water bottle? That kind of behavior screams "mean girl" to me. Especially when it's about a very cool and uplifting quote, and if you think encouraging little girls is "racist", and therefore undesirable, I will not think charitably of you.

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[minoanmiss]

You really do set feminism in opposition to racial equality, don't you? I tried to explain why that classmate, also a little girl, may have felt discouraged, by drawing on my own experiences, and all you can say is that by telling what may very well be her own story, the classmate is "trying to make [this presumably White child] feel bad."You have no empathy for victims of racism, clearly. Enjoy the popcorn you eat whenever you see people being racist, especially to vulnerable children. I for one am done with you.

(And so angry it took me three tries to write this.)

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[cereta]

Thank you for writing it.

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[cereta]

You get that the person you are replying to was a little girl, don't you? A little girl who did not get the kind of encouragement you are advocating specifically because of racism? Or do little girls of color not count in this worldview of yours?

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[staranise]

12 is old enough to see a lot of inequalities. It's old enough that kids who have been carefully nurtured through years of expensive lessons in sports or music can begin seriously competing; it's old enough that kids whose parents have always given them opportunities like summer camps that teach computer coding or robotics can start pursuing these through the youth outreach arms of internationally-famous universities.

Like, I don't know if you know how much kids these days are pushed to feel like they could be the world's youngest PhD or in serious consideration for an Olympic team or whatever if only they tried hard enough--and never informed about the huge amounts of money, privilege, mentorship, and parental support that would be required to get them there.

I was a really bright 90s kid who thought she'd be the next Christopher Paolini, who published a novel at age 13 and then saw it become a NYT bestseller--but I didn't know that his parents paid to have it vanity-published before it got picked up, so all I knew was that every publisher I sent my stuff out to rejected it. I was 7 when I started having meltdowns about not being a child prodigy and therefore being worthless in life, because child prodigies were the "cool and uplifting" inspirational models our teachers always held up for us.

Or as another writer put it about post-1980s children: "We were told we could be anything, but we thought that meant, 'you have to be everything'".

There are many damn good reasons a 12-year-old would have a lot of built-up resentment against a "cool an uplifting quote". When you've been force-fed them since birth, they start to sound like one giant chorus of "why aren't you good enough yet".

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[conuly]

Do you think the only reason to say "This is racist" is because you are mean and want to make people feel bad, and not because, say, you honestly feel that it's racist?

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[lemonsharks]

I for one am curious as to why you think it's appropriate to call a twelve year old child a "lying bitch".

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[dragoness_e]

Because she told a hurtful lie to be mean, or so it appears?

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[staranise]

....I think that disqualifies you from the pool of People Qualified To Come Up With Appropriate Things To Say To Twelve-Year-Olds.

Which is to say: 12-year-olds hurt each other's feelings all the goddamn time. They frequently don't know that they did it, how they did it, or why they did it. If parents simply encouraged their kid to dump every friend that ever made them feel bad, they'd completely fail to teach them social skills, and have a friendless and miserable child.

12 is young enough that kids need to be literally coached to say things like, "When you said my sweater looked lumpy it hurt my feelings because I felt like that meant ugly. Did you mean that?" Because they literally haven't yet developed the emotional and cognitive skills to accurately predict how other people will feel. They're far enough along to say things that are both accurate and cruel, but not actually understand how much that will hurt another person.

White children especially have to be taught how not to be incredibly fragile in discussions of racism, acting as though being associated with a racist system is the same thing as being deeply, personally bigoted and having acted in a hateful manner. Modern understandings of race are that it's not just about individual prejudice; it's about understanding an entire system, acknowledging that fighting racism also means fighting for many underprivileged children to get the same opportunities in life as privileged children, because right now the system is still very unequal. It's a really hard path to walk--acknowledging systemic oppression, but not turning into a doormat who puts up with friends treating you badly because "you're [white/cis/straight/a boy] so you owe it to me." Kids need a lot of help with that.

And as for calling a 12-year-old a bitch, well... that wouldn't work very well for even an adult. If someone says to me, "Hey, staranise, you're a bitch," it's possible I'd be able to inventory my behaviour when they're around and figure out what I did to piss them off and think about what I might have done differently, but it's also highly probable I'd just go, "??? What the fuck was their problem?" and go on with my day. It's not a good way to state your grievances, is what I'm saying.

Especially when you come up with the possibility that you are telling a white girl to tell a girl of colour that she's a bitch for pointing out racism exists, which is like, the perfect storm of how to fuck up race relations in upcoming generations. It's quite flatly true that white kids have a lot more opportunities to follow their dreams and achieve their goals than kids of colour. That's not a lie. It's not 100% a reason to completely piss in every kid's cornflakes, but it calls for a discussion between friends about, "Can we really do anything we set our minds to? Is it better to be blindly optimistic and end up with a ton of student loan debt and no job, or to be more cautious about our ambitions?"

So yeah. There's a lot of places a parent could go with this, and "you're a lying bitch" is exactly none of them.

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[lemonsharks]

I still don't understand why you think it's appropriate to call a twelve year old child you have never met a bitch.

Additionally, racism in Dr. Seuss's racism is

Well: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/02/26/695966537/classic-books-are-full-of-problems-why-cant-we-put-them-down

Documented: http://www.dartmouth.edu/~hist32/History/S31%20-%20The%20Dark%20Side%20of%20Dr.%20Seuss.htm

And children have been unfairly punished and bullied for pushing back against it: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kids-use-dr-seuss-week-to-teach-classmates-about-his-racist-cartoons_n_58b99751e4b0b9989417281f

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[cereta]

You are projecting motives that are not apparent in the letter. You are assuming that the classmate said something she knew to be untrue rather than saying something she believed to be true, and assuming she did it to be mean rather than to combat something she sees as a problem. And I have to tell you, as the mother of a little girl who was accused by her classmates of "telling a hurtful lie to mean" when a boy in her grade groped her, I would have very strong words for an adult who called her what you called the little girl in the letter.

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[conuly]

Dude. "This is racist" isn't a lie. It can't be, because it's an opinion. It's not true OR false, therefore it can't be deliberately false, therefore it's not a lie. Whether or not it's hurtful... well, 12 year olds are still young enough that you give them leeway based on whether or not they were trying to be hurtful.

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[minoanmiss]

Because dragoness_e thinks racism is "a lie", apparently. I think we can have a more productive conversation elsewhere.

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[ayebydan]

I don't think the sticker itself comes across as racist but I do think it is severely problematic because there are a number of factors that can mean life is not so simple. I'm white though so defer to POC to make that decision overall. I do see how a 12 year old who has experiences like have been shared on this post could view it as racist. I think it was big of this girl to not just say 'that is racist, I don't like it it' but also to explain to her classmate why she felt that way as she certainly didn't owe that much either way.

I also think that the daughter acted with agency which seems to being looked over here. She saw it was hurting a classmate, for whatever reason, to took the decision to remove the sticker. Seems pretty big of a 12 year old to me.

And idk it rubs me the wrong way that after a conversation like this the columist responds with a suggestion that could be outside a person's means. Not every family can afford to go get a book like that. I feel there are many wonderful online, and free, resources that could have been suggested, maybe with the book added on as extra.

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[staranise]

I mean, I'd put it this way:

You can steer yourself in any direction you choose.

You can't choose how stormy the weather will be, or how easy the sailing.

You cannot predict the rocks and shoals. You may not have packed enough food.

Some people's parents give them excellent boats. You may be setting sail in a leaky tub.

If you're shipwrecked, don't assume you're a terrible sailor. Wonder if there are rocky shoals in that passage. See if you can find another route with a lighthouse. Ask if you can travel overland. Don't feel like a failure because you didn't reach your destination as fast as the people you left home with.

There is no privilege that genuinely guarantees a storm-free life, and many people can go further than they ever thought they could, but had to take a zig-zag path to get there.

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[minoanmiss]

This is a beautiful way of putting it (and makes me feel a bit better about the whole discussion, after what came to pass above).

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[staranise]

Thank you. It's not as polished as I'd like, but it's what I've got brains for right now.

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[cereta]

That's a lovely metaphor.

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[lemonsharks]

Where is my like button

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[staranise]

It is an ARTISANAL, HAND-MADE like button!

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[xenacryst]

I think I love you for this.

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[dragoness_e]

See, this makes sense. Life is not easy for anyone except maybe the children of the ultra-rich, and I wonder if their lives turn out the way they would have liked in any case?

But telling someone it's wrong[*] to tell people they can try? That's just awful.


[*] in today's world, saying something is 'racist' is saying 'it's wrong and bad', and you know that's how people take it.

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[jadelennox]

So, me being me, I'd use Doctor Seuss a jumping off point for larger conversations about structural racism and ways to approach structural problems, since twelve olds are ready for all of this. Using primary school books with older kids is a pretty effective teaching tool, with the right mediator.

You can start with simplistic ways to approach structual bigotry in Seuss: The Star-Bellied Sneetches and the Butter Battle Book. You can encourage the 12-year-old to talk about the message in those two books, and then get the kid to start talking about the limitations of the colorblind anti-racism / anti-xenophobia they promote. And then you can ask the child to think about why that might or might not be age-appropriate for much younger children, and why that would be.



That sets you up nicely for a conversation about activism: The Lorax. Things don't get better just because you learn to see the other Sneetches as just like you, or you learn it doesn't matter what side you butter your bread on. The Lorax is baby's second activism book (after Click Clack Moo, of course). It closes with the most important punch: it takes work, work from you, the reader, and a whole awful lot of it, or we're all fucked.

The LW's kid sounds like she's ready to talk about that message, and its age appropriateness.



And then, since LW's kid seems old enough for it, you turn to Dr. Seuss's political cartoons for adults (CW: some very racist images). You talk about how he started off as an frequently quite racist political cartoonist. And yet he also created anti-racist cartoons such as this one. You can introduce her to Dr. Philip Nel's framing:

To Nel, the “Mental Insecticide” cartoon is an important clue to the racially insensitive imagery that wound up in some of the children’s books.

“You appreciate the impulse there, but he conceived of racism as a bug, and that’s not how it works,” Nel said. “It’s not aberrant, it’s ordinary. It’s not strange, it’s everyday. That’s what he doesn’t understand. Most people who aren’t targeted by racism don’t think about it. He was not unusual in that respect.”

And finally you can come back to Oh The Places You'll Go. You can discuss how this was written at the end of his life and career, when he was 86 years old. You can discuss how it's almost never been marketed to small children; in fact, it's primarily marketed to high school and college students.

The teachable moment in all this is so rich, and the LW and the kid can take it in many directions. You can take the opportunity to see that beloved authors are complex, and you can love someone's work without loving everything they created or every message they gave. You can discuss how different messages are appropriate for different audiences. You can discuss how, in some historical moments, an understanding of structural issues is not always comprehensive.

And you can talk about the tension between encouraging everyone to fight achieve their dreams, and the underlying structural inequities or capitalist myths that underly that. And how both can exist and both be true, because reality, like Theodore Geisel, is complex and multi-faceted.

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[dragoness_e]

This is interesting. So perhaps Dr. Suess was a "man of his time", and trying to do better as he got older and wiser?

Mod Post

[cereta]

Okay, folks, we're done here. While I appreciate that there are larger cultural discussions that need to happen, I don't think we're going to get anywhere at this point. I'm freezing the existing threads, and new comments will be deleted.